Load and traffic engineering in optical network

The popularity of the Internet and its related services continues to be one of the main reasons for the explosive growth of traffic volume in global information and optical network. This paper presents an analytical approach for studying load and traffic engineering (TE) in optical network. Load balancing is common in optical networks. It is a key component of traffic engineering, link bundling, and equal cost multi-path routing. Recent trends in load balancing point towards to dynamic protocols. Dynamic load balancing needs schemes that split traffic across multiple paths at a fine granularity. In traditional IP networks the tools for traffic engineering are limited due to the lack of control of the used routes. Explicit routing allows the packets to be routed along pre-defined paths. As the traffic is split into multiple parallel paths a finer distribution over the network is obtained. TE makes the optical network operate more efficient.